The success of the first harvest in the Western Marches created a logistical crisis that no amount of engineering foresight could have fully mitigated. Fifty thousand acres of high-yield winter wheat were maturing at an accelerated rate, turning the grey wasteland into a sea of gold. But wheat in the field was not bread on the table. To move a harvest of this magnitude from the landlocked Marches to the hungry Free Cities of the Coast, Deacon faced a brutal reality: the existing road networks were little more than dirt tracks, and the Imperial River Guilds held a stranglehold on the only navigable waterways.
Deacon stood in the middle of the Oakhaven-West command center, a temporary structure of corrugated iron and timber, staring at a topographical map of the region. The map was littered with red ink, marking the territories controlled by the Great River Syndicate. For centuries, the Syndicate had operated as a legalized mafia, charging exorbitant "protection tolls" and forcing every merchant to use their slow, hand-poled barges.
"If we use the roads, thirty percent of the grain will rot before it reaches the coast," Deacon said, his finger tracing the winding path of the Grey-Silt River. "And if we use the Syndicate's barges, they'll take sixty percent of the profit in 'handling fees.' We aren't just farming, Julian. We're being suffocated by a monopoly that hasn't updated its technology since the Collapse."
"The Syndicate won't take kindly to competition, David," Julian warned, leaning over the map. He had been handling the diplomatic fallout with the Church, but the economic threat was even more immediate. "They have thousands of armed watermen and the backing of the Merchant Lords in Solstice. To them, the river is a divine right."
"Then we'll give them a new river," Deacon replied.
His plan was the Grand Western Canal. Instead of fighting for space on the shallow, silt-clogged natural rivers, Deacon proposed a deep-water, straight-line canal that would connect the Western Marches directly to the Oryn Estuary. It was a project of staggering scale—a hundred miles of engineered waterway, equipped with a series of hydraulic locks driven by the same geothermal principles he had used in Oakhaven.
The construction began not with shovels, but with the "Iron Mole," a massive, steam-powered excavating machine Deacon and Miller had designed in the Oakhaven foundries. The Mole was a beast of iron and brass, featuring a rotating cutting head equipped with diamond-tipped teeth and a continuous conveyor system to dump the spoil into waiting steam-wagons.
As the Iron Mole bit into the earth, carving a perfect, twenty-foot-deep channel at the rate of a mile a week, the news reached the River Syndicate. They didn't send lawyers; they sent a blockade.
Three weeks into the project, as the canal reached the intersection of the Grey-Silt tributary, Deacon found the path blocked by twenty heavy Syndicate barges, lashed together to form a floating fortress. Hundreds of armed watermen, wielding crossbows and long-handled boarding pikes, stood on the decks. At the center stood Commodore Varth, a man whose skin was as weathered as old leather and who wore the silk sashes of the Syndicate's High Council.
"This water belongs to the Guild, Northerner!" Varth roared across the gap. "You can carve your ditches in the dirt, but you will not bleed the Grey-Silt to fill them. Every drop of water in this province is Syndicate property. Turn your machine around, or we'll sink your 'Iron Mole' and leave your men for the eels."
Deacon stepped to the edge of the excavation, looking down at the rusted barges. He saw the inefficiency of their design—the drag of the hulls, the primitive sail-rigs, the sheer waste of human labor. It was a system built on stagnation.
"I'm not bleeding your river, Varth," Deacon called back, his voice steady. "I'm bypassing it. The Grand Western Canal is a closed-loop system fed by the mountain aquifers. I don't need your silt. But I am going to cross your territory. According to the Imperial Charter of Transit, an Independent Mining Union has the right of way for 'logistical infrastructure.' You're the ones in breach of the law."
"The law ends where the water begins!" Varth shouted, raising his hand to his crossbowmen.
Deacon didn't flinch. He signaled to Miller, who was positioned at the controls of the Iron Mole's high-pressure steam-vent.
"I'm going to give you one chance to unlash those barges," Deacon said. "The Iron Mole doesn't just dig; it clears debris. If those boats are still there in five minutes, I'm going to engage the forward pressure-washers. It won't sink you, but it'll strip the paint, the sails, and the skin off anyone standing on the deck."
The tension was a physical pressure in the air. The watermen looked at the massive, hissing machine, then at their Commodore. They had spent their lives fighting other men, but they had never fought a mountain-mover.
"He's bluffing!" Varth screamed. "Hold the line!"
Deacon didn't wait five minutes. He waited thirty seconds. He saw the watermen beginning to tension their crossbow strings.
"Miller. Full pressure. Wide aperture."
The Iron Mole let out a shriek of escaping steam as the forward nozzles engaged. A wall of high-pressure water, concentrated and unrelenting, slammed into the lead barges. It wasn't a spray; it was a physical hammer. The sails were shredded in seconds. The watermen were swept off the decks as if by a giant's hand. The barges, unsecured by the force of the water, began to lurch and groan against their moorings.
"Unlash! Unlash for your lives!" a voice cried out from the second rank of boats.
The Syndicate's blockade broke in a chaotic scramble of cut ropes and splintering wood. The barges were pushed aside by the sheer force of the Oakhaven hydraulics, clearing a path for the Mole to continue its relentless forward march.
Deacon watched as the Syndicate retreated downstream, their pride as battered as their hulls. But he knew this was a declaration of war. By building the canal, he wasn't just moving grain; he was destroying the economic foundation of the South.
"The canal must be finished before the first frost," Deacon told Julian as they watched the Mole bite into the next mile of earth. "Varth will go to the Merchant Lords, and they'll go to the Empress. We have to make the canal an 'essential Imperial asset' before they can pass a decree to fill it in."
The "Grand Western Canal" became the new obsession of Oakhaven. It was a race against politics, a battle of engineering against tradition. Deacon was no longer just reclaiming the soil; he was re-mapping the Empire's arteries. And in the dark, deep water of the rising canal, he could see the reflection of a world that would never be the same.